Why Tyler Cowen Doesn't Meet Protestant Intellectuals
There may be fewer evangelical intellectuals but that's not the only reason Cowen doesn't meet them
Tyler Cowen is an economist and public intellectual who is the main writer at Marginal Revolution. When he linked to my recent piece in City Journal about North vs. South Appalachia, I had more people write to me to tell me about it than about any other mention I’ve ever gotten. He’s a very popular guy.
He recently put up a short post about how more and more of the classical liberals he meets are religious. I noticed this nugget in there.
If a meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last. [emphasis added]
I have a few thoughts about why Cowen meets so few Protestant intellectuals.
First, Protestant intellectuals tend not to center their Protestant identity in the way Catholics do. For example, Robert George, Amy Coney Barrett, Patrick Deneen, and Duncan Stroik are all people for whom their Catholic identity is central to their public persona.
Perhaps for cultural reasons, Protestants tend not to do that. There are some Episcopalians among movement conservatism leaders, for example, but they are very quiet about it. In fact, when I researched the religious background of leaders of conservative organizations a while back, I actually had to ask most of the Episcopalians personally to figure out their religion because it wasn’t online anywhere I could find. Evangelicals seem to be in the same. In a previous post, I noted that the person I think is the top evangelical public intellectual is someone I couldn’t actually list because he has never to the best of my knowledge publicly stated he is a Protestant.
Secondly, Catholics have institutions and networks designed to publicly support and promote their intellectuals. Protestants don’t have that. For example, I had coffee this morning with someone who is a retired chemist. He got his Ph.D. at Harvard under Robert Burns Woodward, who was a Nobel Prize winner and the leading organic chemist of the 20th century. This person was at the top of his class and went on to a highly successful research career in the pharmaceutical industry. He’s presently working on writing about the relationship between Reformed theology and science. But nobody in the evangelical world even knows about him.
You would think that after decades of bemoaning the “scandal of the evangelical mind,” we would be heavily promoting the world class scientists and other intellectual figures we have. But that isn’t the case.
I’m not a scientist but I’m not chopped liver either. I was a partner in a consulting firm, a senior fellow in a major think tank, and have written for and been cited in most of the major publications in the country (NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Atlantic, etc). But the institution that’s done the most to promote my work is the Catholic-centric First Things magazine.
Undoubtedly the best career move I could make as a writer on culture, men’s issues, and public policy would be to convert to Catholicism. That would probably open doors to opportunities I will not otherwise get.
The case of former NIH director Francis Collins is the exception that proves the rule. Evangelicals heavily promoted Collins at both the personal and institutional level. This is what Catholics are able to do for their intellectuals but which is all too rare in the evangelical world.
For more on the Catholic “intellectual ecosystem,” read this 2021 piece from Onsi Aaron Kamel on the subject.
Third, Catholicism is normative within US conservatism. As I’ve noted many times, postwar conservatism has been a heavily Catholic-Jewish project. Within the Christian wing of movement conservatism, Catholicism is essentially normative. That’s one reason that inbound converts to Catholicism have long played a significant role in conservatism. I’m told many young, ambitious conservatives in DC end up converting even today. I’m sure most of these are genuine, but the fact that conservatism is a heavily Catholic milieu surely plays something of a role. (Religion spread through social networks if nothing else). So it’s no surprise that the list of classical liberal types Cowen meets lead off with Catholics and Jews. Evangelicals may be the biggest, most important voting block in the Republican coalition, but they are not the proverbial deciders.
Fourth, there are undoubtedly some substantive problems with a lack of top flight Protestant public intellectual talent. Joel Carini just highlighted some of the cultural traits that inhibit this development. Fergus McCullough also listed some internal considerations.
Nevertheless, I would say that Cowen’s experience is not fully reflective of reality due to points one through three above. In all of them, Protestants have work to do - centering identity, creating or leveraging networks and institutions, and renegotiating their relationship with movement conservatism.
Cover image credit: Politics and Prose Bookstore, CC BY-SA 2.0
Hi Aaron,
I think part of this relates to what you've written already about the decline of the mainline. I think it also has to do with the decline of public school education. Catholics have their own schools from K-PhD. Protestants had their own schools too, Harvard, Yale, publicly funded schools that said the Lord's Prayer every morning, etc... Now the public schools are secular. The Catholic schools are secularizing, too, but at a slower rate. There are outlier groups like the Christian Reformed Church that has its own Christian Day Schools and some universities too. But, at least when I was at Calvin University there was a pipeline moving back and forth between Calvin and Notre Dame.
The homeschooling movement among some evangelicals is too small to make the kind of difference that a large Christian School or network of Christian schools can do.
A lot of this does turn on the anti-intellectual bent of the fundamentalist reaction to theological liberalism. Couple that with an a-historical approach to Christianity that seems blissfully ignorant regarding recent Christian events in the past 2000 years, and the Protestant Christian Scholar will struggle to find peers that aren't secular, aren't theologically liberal, and aren't Roman Catholic.
I hesitate to write this because it may come across as being disagreeable when I'm only attempting to focus upon differences of moral formation, historically, between Protestants and Roman Catholics.
I'm reading a good book right now - The Roots of Reformed Moral Theology by Bruce Baugus.
It helpfully provides that history, both in the OT, NT, and the Church as to how moral theology developed alongside the phlosophy of ethics in general. The two overlap but are not coextensive. Some historians, for instance, have attempted to argue that the Jews borrowed from Greek phlosophy to develop their ideas about how to act in society while others have attempted to show that the Greeks copied the OT Scriptures.
Regardless of where you fall down, the Church did not historcially try to develop a phlsophy of ethics from generally agreed upon pricniples but from what they believed was revealed by God. There was futher development in the Medieval Church that more or less developed a tradition that included asceticism and other moral practices to the poitn at which the Reformation came in and the Roman Church diverged from the Reformed Churches in terms of moral conduct.
The reason why the Roman Church developed a much more extensive system of causistry around moral practice owes, in no small measure, to their Sacrament of Penance and the "rules" around what is or isn't a venial or a mortal sin. This matters because the Church needs to know what to tell a person to "do" with respect to penance.
Add to this a difference, historcailly, on the nature of mankind and whther concupiscence is sin or it is a tendency toward sin. The Roman Church has a much higher view on the good the man is capable of doing without grace.
I think that if you look, historically at Protestant Churces that emerged drom their Confessional moorings, you will have seen communities that were engaged in trying to follow an ethical sytesm of living that was rooted in what they believed the Word of God told them. In the Roman Church, the system was a set of clear, even philsophical outworkings, as to what the Church had worked out. The latter system lends itself much more to being a holistic system while the Portestant system has always tied to provide principles of "general equity" as to how a person should live their lives. There is also a very clear, herarchical system that a Roman Catholic can turn to in order to say: this is what the Church teaches.
I don't think there was ever a time where the "Preotestan establishment" had a sort of Erastican system of how the people and the state should operate. While the State in Eurpoean nations was the defender and promoter of the State religion then it feflected the general convictions of that Church. In America, while the people were mostly Church going and believed the things that the Sciptures taught then a gernal sense of Protestant etihics prevaled.
I don't know if I'm making any sense out of this, but I am skeptical of attemtps to create a "Protestant consensus" that tries to provide some sort of institutional unity and "respecatblity" for Biblical ethics. Thsoe of us who are successful in business and government (I've done both) have few illusions that we'll see a return to the time whern there was a Protestant consensus. In fact, those trying to "rebuild" this may larn a lot from the Evangelical and Catholics Together (ECT) movement of the mid to late 90's as Chuck Colson and others were tyring to fill the void created by the retreat of Protestant Liberals from the moral center of America's moral formation. That only proved that many Protestants are so desparate for "moral formaiton" that they will compomise the defintion of the Gospel itself in order to create a respectable power bloc with Catholics.
I'll close with an anectdote. I was listening to a popular podcast that talks to tehcnical, political, and ecnonomic trends. One of the hosts is a powerful Lesbian journalist while the other is an entrepeneou. They were both appalled by the new Speaker of the Hourse, calling him a wahacko and a "Christan nationalist" because he claims to get his ethical ideas fromt he Scriptures. I don't see the current Speaker as a paragon of Christian theology, but it's nigh impossible for a ture, historical Protestant ethic to take hold if Protestants are forced to deny that their ethcial formation is inextricably connected to what the Scirptures teach either directly or by good and necessary consequence.